I work as an editor but my life hasn’t always been glamourous. As someone who grew up in a low-income family, we would live life and day according to the day, and sometimes my older sibling and I would go to bed on an empty stomach. I think this though me how to be resilient, and it made me who I am today. I wouldn’t change this for anything in the world because it made me who I am today.
I am the first person in my family to graduate from college, and now I have the job of my dreams, working as an editor for a famous book publishing company. So, without further ado, let’s dive into this blog and learn more about what it’s like being an editor.
What does an editor do?
Most publishing companies are now looking for an editor to proofread and curate their content more than ever. Good English and vocabulary will never go out of style. An editor’s job is to define someone’s writing their voice, achieve the piece’s purpose and make sure that the audience understands the specific text.
As someone who edits books, I get to read a lot of books in advance and let me tell you, the first draft is always rough. You have to get rid of all grammatical mistakes, make sure punctuation is right and make sure that the tone is perfect.
Professional editing differs from one industry to the next. The duties of an editor vary according to what kind of editing job they do. There are many extraneous tasks attached to the editor’s role, which is different in each specific industry.
Here are the different types of editing jobs out there:
1. Academic editing
This is a beast of its own; academic editing belongs to the sphere of academic output. This position is usually held by someone who has an academic background or already works in academia. You can have a full-time in-house position as an academic publisher, or you might even voluntary work as a part-time contributor as a journal editor.
You will be in charge of structural and copy editing, but you will also ensure that there is academic rigor and practice in the work you are editing. Checking academic rigor means that you’ll have to check facts, verify bibliographical data, plagiarism, and even arrange the creation of indexes.
As an academic editor, you will also be expected to coordinate the peer-review process, and after that, you’ll communicate feedback to the authors.
2. Book editing
As a book editor, you will be working closely with writers to streamline and revise their manuscripts before they are published. This usually involves a variety of editing jobs, including anything from developmental editing to proofreading to copy editing. The latter 2 are generally done on a freelance basis or through commission for authors themselves or publishers.
An in-house editor will edit texts and work with a publisher who is responsible for communicating with authors or literary agents. You will also have to be the coordinator with other publishing departments, commission new titles, design, and even publicity.
A book editor will also have to perform routine and administrative tasks such as updating book metadata, covering blurbs, and so much more.
3. Legal editing
This type of editing work will involve you working within the judicial and legal system. You will be responsible for a particular legal organization and its legal output, which needs to be proofread and edited to make sure there is no typo and that it is per the legal system. Or you will work as an in-house editor at a legal publishing company.
As a legal editor, you will be responsible for compiling court cases, analyzing legal news, researching legal issues and developments. The job of a legal editor is not entirely different from that of a technical writer, which means that your primary objective is to ensure compliance ad accuracy. The aim of this is to protect the publication at hand.
4. News and magazine editing
As a magazine or news editor, you will be responsible for the structural editing and proofreading of articles, fact-checking, and ensuring the consistency of the publication and its specific style. You will also be in charge of the relevance of the publications of themes or aims.
You will also be in charge of commissioning articles from regular contributors, reporting to the publication’s editorial board, and responding to pitches. Most subeditors usually work on editing texts and don’t have any managerial or commissioning duties.
A section editor will be in charge of developing the direction and strategy of their specific section, and they will have to report this to management.
5. Technical editing
As stated earlier, technical editing is a bit akin to legal editing. The technical editor’s main concern is to ensure that technical information is accurate and communicated clearly. They aren’t as much concerned with the fluency of expressions or grammatical correctness per se.
Because of this, technical editors must be experts in the matter at hand and are usually hired to apply their technical knowledge to a piece of writing. As a technical writer, you will have to check graphs and equations and make sure that they are accurate.
They ensure that information complexity meets the knowledge level for their specific intended level. A technical editor can also, at times, operate as a subject matter consultant.
6. Web editing
I started my editing journey by working as a web editor, and it is mostly about managing an organization’s digital content, which includes blogs, social media posts, and so on. The specificities of the job of a web editor differ from company to company.
The typical duties of this type of editor are to commission or assign a new piece of digital content, edit articles or blogs posted for publication and decide on subjects to be covered. You will have to use SEO (Search Engine Optimize) tools that attract organic traffic, promote content on social media, and make decisions about how posts are presented.
Sound off in the comments section below and tell us what you want to read next and if you want to read more about being an editor.
